Media mogul Rupert Murdoch will close Britain’s most popular newspaper, The News of the World, in a bid to prevent the outrage over the tabloid’s phone hacking scandal from infecting the other news outlets he owns. British detectives investigating the illegal phone hacking conducted by the newspaper’s staff say the number of victims could exceed 4,000.

Murdoch is chairman and chief executive of News Corporation, which counts FOX and The Wall Street Journal amongst its $60 billion of assets, and he’s also spending $12.5 billion to purchase BSkyB, Britain’s biggest pay-TV operator.